I. Technical Field
This invention relates to a method and system for processing reservations for use and purchase of all kinds of products, including facility use and ticket purchases.
II. Description of the Related Art
Numerous proposals have been made in the past regarding reservation processing methods and reservation processing systems that use a computer for conducting reservation-based sales of facility use rights, tickets and the like.
Moreover, as wide-area communications networks, typically the Internet, have spread and grown faster in recent years, and the number of occasions on which people use reservation systems directly for purchasing products has increased, so that many reservation systems have been developed in pursuit of ease of use and convenience for the general user.
Further, reservation processing techniques include ones aimed at maximizing profit through reservation-based sales by suitably adjusting product prices up and down in accordance with reservation conditions (i.e., applying the economic principle of lowering the price of items for which demand is scare and increasing the price of items for which demand is huge), thereby avoiding concentration of reservation seekers on certain kinds of reservations, and with regard to these, research has from the past been conducted concerning automatic prices setting techniques, in the issue of Revenue Management/Yield Management, and many proposals have been made in the past as typified by the air ticket reservation systems of US airline companies.
The teachings set out in the following references, for example, are of interest regarding such past reservation processing techniques and reservation processing systems.    1) Unexamined Japanese Patent Application JP-A-2002-117210    2) Unexamined Japanese Patent Application JP-A-2003-256702    3) Unexamined Japanese Patent Application JP-A-2003-256703    4) Unexamined Japanese Patent Application JP-A-2001-331657    5) Unexamined Japanese Patent Application JP-A-2002-109337